Collecting My Thought on Dragon Age: Inquisition—But Thou Must Decrease

I am not a fan of jumping into the middle or end of a series without first playing the titles that came earlier. In the case of Dragon Age I did not know enough about the series to know whether Inquisition was the first, last, or perhaps the only in its series. Hungry for a time-devouring RPG, I grabbed from the shelf a game I remember hearing good things about when it was released a few years back. Boy did I bite off more than I could chew. Running close to 200 hours, there is ample story to go around in Dragon Age: Inquisition, but this might not be as good a thing as it initially sounds.

The narrative starts with a hole ripping open in the sky and letting in a deluge of demons into the world. From here it develops within an ever-complicating web of relationships between the 10+ main characters and many more minor characters. The minutiae of these relationships turn out to be much more intriguing than the main arc itself. Your main main character that you design and make choices as is Adaar, and as head of the revered Inquisition, there is a boulder of a burden on your shoulder. As you fight to contain and banish the interloping demons, people will turn to you to make choices that will alter the very fabric of the Thedas continent. And to make sure you don't make porridge out of it, there are literally hundreds upon hundreds of pages of lore about the region and its inhabitants to pore over to help you make more informed decisions. The sheer volume of consistently well-written texts is both awe-inspiring and overwhelming at the same time. Though I have recently learnt to properly appreciate the power of reading, reading a novel's worth of texts of disordered styles and content is a big ask. There must be a more elegant way to roll out the lore.

Furthermore, the cinematics are crudely edited and animated, and the gameplay suffers from a host of off-putting bugs. A more polished storytelling would have allowed the game to soar to unbelievable heights because what the game does manage to do well, it knocks out of the park. Voice acting, writing consistency and especially characterisation are all phenomenal, and the party and battle mechanics really drive home the "come together" theme of the game. Despite being fun and highly retentive, Dragon Age: Inquisition somehow manages to turn its most ambitious excesses into somewhat grave shortcomings.

#FavouriteCharacter Cole is one of the most pleasant video game characters to listen to that I've encountered in a while. There's almost an accidental poetry to his speech.

#LearntANewWord Fracas.

#FashionablyLateBy Five years.

#FavouriteBoss The Ferelden Frostback was the first dragon and the most challenging. Some tries individually took hours and one was even thwarted by a glitch that reset the dragon to full health when I was 70% of the way through! :'(